Thrice He Knocked Upon My Door
by La Guera
Summary: Missouri Moseley sees the indistinct figure in the Impala, but she isn't afraid. He just needs a little help, and sooner or later, he'll get out of the car, walk across the street, and knock on the door.


**Disclaimer: **All recognizable characters, places, and events herein are the property of Eric Kripke, Rob Singer, and the CW. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.

**A/N: **Written for SPN13 on Livejournal. Mild spoilers for Episodes 101, 108, 122, and 201.

_December 14-17, 1983_

The first time Missouri Moseley sees John Winchester, he's just an indistinct figure behind the wheel of his car, arms draped loosely over the steering wheel. There's an air of possessiveness to the gesture even with the slumped shoulders and the wary observation from the dim interior of the Chevy, and she suspects that he's a man who loves his cars. If the Chevy's any indication, he loves hard. And he's a detail man.

"Well, that's sinister, isn't it?" says a voice to her left. It's coming from Mrs. Lindstrom, one of her regulars. She's a bona fide hypochondriac, and she's bundled so stoutly and fanatically against the Kansas winter that she look like the Michelin Man, with doughy rolls of white skin bulging from between layers of winter clothes. She'd come today for reassurance that her gas pains aren't the heralding pangs of oncoming colon cancer, and she doesn't have the heart to tell her that she'll never see death coming. One morning three years from now, she'll be at her grapefruit and bran flakes and drop in her bowl from a stroke. It's a truth she keeps to herself. Sometimes, there's nothing to be done.

She pats Mrs. Lindstrom on one coat-puffy shoulder. "I don't think so," she says. "He's just a tad shy like as not. Most folks are the first time they come to see me."

It's true that she senses no threat from the figure in the idling car, but it's also true that she won't know for certain until he gets closer. Close enough to look in the eye. She raises a hand in greeting, and John Winchester, who as yet has no name, raises his in return, two stiff fingers held together in a brusque salute. Nothing else.

_He's working up the nerve, _she thinks idly. _He either will, or he won't._

"Hmph," says Mrs. Lindstrom suspiciously. "You be sure to call the sheriff now if he lingers too long, you hear?" she insists. "You never know what his kind could be up to in this day and age." She shivers melodramatically, and Missouri suspects that Mrs. Lindstrom has a fair few ideas as to what his kind could be doing. Some of them might even be wishes.

"I will," she promises, and pats Mrs. Lindstrom again, a farmer trying to nudge an obstinate mule to the yoke.

Placated, Mrs. Lindstrom says her goodbyes and waddles down the porch steps like a snowman who's learned to walk. She never takes her eyes off the car, not even when she's on the sidewalk and turning towards home. She even stumbles backwards for a few yards to keep it in sight, as if she's afraid it will roar into sudden life and mow her down in a mess of smoking rubber and melting snow run red. Missouri bites her tongue, torn between amusement and the desire to pick up a stone from her footpath and hurl it at the back of Hannah Lindstrom's head in the dim hope of knocking some sense into it. Eventually, Hannah Lindstrom disappears around the corner, and Missouri focuses her attention on the car and the man inside it.

She thinks he'll get out now that she's alone, but he doesn't. He just sits and watches, and the car rumbles just as sweet as you please, a jungle cat settled cautiously into concealing savannah grass. He's not ready yet. Close, but not ready to walk off the edge and let it all go. He's waiting, and so will she, but like hell if she's going to freeze to death while she does it. She raises her hand again to show that she's available if he's a mind, and then she turns and retreats into the warm, furnace-heat of the house.

She makes tea while she waits from him to make up his mind, and while it steeps, she dusts the heavy, applewood table in the room where she tells her truths and occasional kind lies. It's a task she's done every day for as long as she can remember, since she was tall enough to reach it, she supposes, and before that, her mother and grandmother had done it. Grandmama Mose's hands had reeked of Pledge, and it was one of the pleasantest smells she knew. The table was an heirloom, a gift passed down through the women of her line just like the eye that opens in the center of her mind whenever she looks another human being in the eye. The table she'll cherish until the day she dies. The eye she can take or leave. Most of the time, she wishes she could put it out.

She dusts and polishes the old table until she can see her own ghost on its surface, and she wonders briefly if that's where the Moseley womenfolk go when they die. Not to Heaven or Hell, but into the table to watch succeeding generations see themselves in the table's heart. Maybe that the source of the eye's power. Maybe when she presses her palms and elbows to the smooth wood, her grandmama and her mother pass up truths along the line, truths that pay her bills and keep food on the table and every now and then do somebody some good.

It's a funny thought to be having, even for somebody who makes her living talking to the dead and peering into the most intimate thoughts of the desperate, and she's still mulling it over when she heads toward the kitchen for her tea. She's halfway across the living room when she realizes there's a shadow behind the front door. She sees the outline through the thin, white curtain that covers the door, and she knows that the man from the Chevy is standing on her front porch.

She stops, dishtowel clutched in one hand. She's not afraid, but she's on point. The scent of Pledge hits her nose, astringent and citric, and it reassures her. The Pledge is safe, and as long as she has that tatty old dishtowel, she's safe. She doesn't know how she knows that, but she does, and she knows better than to question it. She brings the towel to her nose and breathes in deep, and she watches the shadow man.

When nothing happens, she moves closer to the door. Sensations and scraps of emotion seep underneath the door like smoke, and she breathes them in deep, too. She doesn't have a choice. The eye is burning now, and it wants to know. She smells smoke and tastes fire and catches a glimpse of the man behind the door. He's dark-eyed and strong and broken clean in half by something she can't quite see. He's got stubble on his chin and too little sleep in his eyes and a ragged, bleeding hole where his heart used to be.

"Oh, sweet, merciful Jesus," she mutters to herself, and closes her eyes against a wave of pity. She moves no closer to the door. He's not ready, not today. The pain is still too deep, and the embarrassment is still too hot, and he won't come to her until he's sure he can pretend that he isn't bleeding to death.

He disappears, and she lets out a breath she hadn't realized she's been holding, and she goes into the kitchen for her tea, the dishtowel dustrag clenched in her fingers. It isn't until she lifts the teapot to pour her tea that she realizes her hands are trembling. She sets the teapot down, almost drops it in her haste, and then she presses her shivering palms to the counter and waits for them to stop, for her legs to find their bones. They do, eventually, but for a long time, she stands with her head bowed and mutters, "Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus," like a prayer for deliverance.

He isn't ready the second time he comes, either. She never sees the car that time, just his shadow behind the door and seeping beneath the door to stain the hardwood floor of her parlor. She feels him, too, raw and desperate and heavy with grief. It makes her chest ache even with the distance and the door between them, and she wonders how hard it'll hit her when they're standing eye to eye on her front porch and her mind's eye is burning with the need to pull his clumsy emotional bandages back and take a good, long look at the wound that's bleeding him dry.

_Like a ten-poun' hammer, Missouri girl, _murmurs Grandmama Mose inside head, and she'd laugh for crying if she could, but she's sitting at her applewood table with old Abe Poindexter, and so she swallows the sound, and when Abe asks her if she's all right, she pats his papery, blue-veined hand and tells him she thinks she's got a bit of a chest cold, that's all.

He's an expert on chest colds, of course; at eighty, Abe Poindexter is damn near an expert on everything, and if he's not, he can bluff his way to the truth more often than not. He offers advice on wildroot tea and clove tea, and she does her best to listen, but most of her is drawn to the door where John Winchester stands on his work-booted feet and argues with himself about whether or not to knock on her door. She knows even before he does that he won't, not this time, just like she knows that his name is John Winchester and he's got blood on his hands and holes in his heart.

He's gone by the time Abe Poindexter hobbles to the door and gives her a dry, old man's kiss on the cheek, and she suspects that's a blessing. Abe might be older than Methuselah, but he's still an old dog under the skin, and what John Winchester carries with him'd put the fight into anybody. As it is, when she opens the door to see him out and down the porch steps, there is only the lingering smell of smoke and sweat. And the cold, tangy bite of snow, of course, gunmetal and sex under wool.

In truth, part of her is grateful for John Winchester's intrusion because it spares her from having to tell Abe Poindexter the same white lie she's told for five years, ever since he turned up on her doorstep with his secret lodged in his heart like a clot. The daughter he walked out on fifty years back doesn't spare him a thought, didn't even before she got hit by a pulp truck up in Augusta. He was as dead to her as the skin she sloughed onto the bedsheets and the cells she shed into the toilet during her monthlies. But she's never told him that, and she's never going to, because the truth only cures the ills of those who want to hear it.

"You don't mind me now, Abr'am," she says as she rubs his narrow, bony back. "I'll be fine."

Abe leaves her porch and her footpath with the serene deliberation of those in no particular hurry to get where they're going. It is, she supposes, the patience of the aged, who never know when a walk will end with their toes pointing heavenward. Old Abe doesn't have to worry, though. He'll be going strong fifteen years from now, long after arthritis has crept into her fingers and back and knees and scrubbing the parlor floors requires a song of sixpence from her spine. She wishes him well and stands on the porch to watch him fade in the distance, elbows cupped in her hands. She's still there long after he's not, and the wind in the barren trees reminds her of weeping, the kind that hurts down deep and never truly stops.

_John Winchester knows that sound, _she thinks. _Knows it in his bones. _The thought makes her own bones colder, and she goes into the house, closes the door against the ghosts in the wind, and puts the kettle on.

She's alone when he comes back the third time, and if she's honest with herself, she knows she's been waiting for this since she saw that Chevy parked across the street. And she knew it would be today, too. That's why she's been fussing with the ornaments on the Christmas tree, picking them off branches and putting them back on. It's why she told Hannah Lindstrom to let Doc Goodall have a poke at her insides for a change if she was so worried about her gas pains. It occurs to her as she swaps Santa with Woodstock that she might've lost herself some good custom with her uncharacteristic display of frankness, but that's all right. She'll get by, and some things just have to be done.

She knows he's there before he knocks. The weight of his shadow steals over her back, portentous as the promise of a lover's caress, and she crosses herself without thinking before she turns from the tree and goes to the door. She waits with her hand upon the cold, brass knob until the shadow man raises his hand and knocks, and she counts to three before she opens the door.

He's standing on her threshold with his hands stuffed into the pockets of a green, army-surplus jacket that doesn't look near warm enough, but she suspects that he can't feel the cold, not when it's coming from the inside, too. His feet are planted squarely on her battered welcome mat, and she knows that he'll scrape his soles thoroughly even though there is nothing much on them. He looks up at the sound of the opening door, and she sees the stubble on his cheeks and chin and the hangdog, sleepless worry in his bloodshot eyes.

_Man's haunted, _she thinks, and her mind's eye opens wide to let the truth in.

He shuffles from one foot to the other and offers her a ragged-nailed hand. "Hello, ma'am," he says quietly. "My name is-,"

"I know what your name is, John Winchester," she says kindly. "'Bout time you gathered the gumption to come see me." She pats him on the shoulder and stands aside to grant him entry.

He blinks at her in surprise, but he comes inside, wiping his feet just like she thought he would, and as he passes her, she smells smoke, bitter and acrid.

_It's from the fire, _she thinks. _It's from the fire, and it'll never come out, not completely. It'll linger in the fabric of his clothes until they fall apart, and even after he tosses them into the trash, that bitterbark stink'll stick to his skin and live in his nostrils. He'll wake up in the middle of the night with fire in his nose, and he'll bolt from the bed, convinced that the flames have found him again. He'll run to his children's room to make sure they aren't burning in their beds, and when he finds them safe, he'll put his hands on his knees and suck sweet air until he can't taste blackened happiness on his tongue._

She doesn't know how she understands this, but she doesn't question it. Her mother once told her that only fools keep asking questions after the answers come and Grandmama Mose had put it more simply still when she'd said that a man who looks a gift horse in the mouth will eventually smell the stink of its asshole. Her mother had been scandalized, but she had laughed until her sides ached, and Grandmama Mose had slipped her a cinnamon disk from the pocket of her apron. She's never forgotten that piece of wisdom. Or the spicy sweetness of the candy in her mouth as she had followed her grandmama into the kitchen to help with the dishes.

"I've got some tea if you're interested," she says as she leads him toward the parlor and her applewood table. "But something tells me you're a Maxwell House man. Actually, I know what you've most a mind to have, but there hasn't been any of that here since my no-account worse half took the last of it with him in '72."

"Coffee is fine, ma'am. I appreciate it."

"Black as the minute after midnight?"

He blinks again. "Yes, ma'am."

"It's Missouri, John Winchester," she says. "Ma'am is for your mama and your elders, and I'm not ready for the bonepile yet."

She goes into the kitchen to get the tea and coffee, and when she comes back, he's still standing where she left him, sidling from foot and foot and chafing his nape with one hand. He reminds her of a boy on the edge of growing up, awkward and scared, but too proud to admit either. She swallows a sympathetic smile and gestures to a chair with a jerk of her head.

"Sit down. Untrouble yourself."

He'll do a lot of unburdening before the afternoon is over, she knows, but for a while, he doesn't say anything. He just picks up the cup of steaming coffee and drinks in slow sips, eyes distant and exhausted. They've turned inward, reliving a past only he can see. He's spent a long time outrunning it and running it down all at once, and the constant pull of the chase is thinning him around the edges, deepening the lines around his eyes and mouth. He tells himself that he'd stop if he could, but she understands that it's a comfortable lie, one that lets him get out of bed every morning and put one foot in front of the other. He'll chase until the hurting stops or until he dies, and she's not sure he cares which that might be.

"What brings you here today, John?" she says quietly when half her tea is gone and the rest is cool on her tongue.

He laughs, a bitter, raw chuff that speaks of screams and smoke, and sets down his mug. "To be honest, ma-Missouri, I'm not sure you'd believe me if I told you."

"Honey, I have heard it all, and you'd be surprised what I believe," she says calmly.

Nothing rattles her anymore, though she prides herself on the fact that she hasn't been deadened to sorrow. She's sat across from women being eaten alive by cancer and fathers who dreamed of diddling their little girls. She's held the hand of wronged women and served coffee to the men who did them wrong. She's told girls with the barest nubs of womanhood on their chests that the ache in their bellies was the beginning of a son. She's pulled guilt from broken hearts like splinters, and every now and then, she sees a truth that makes her laugh until she cries. Like the distraught woman who came to her sure that her husband was possessed of the Devil because there were strange voices rumbling from his gut in the middle of the night. That had turned out to be IBS, and she'd gone into her kitchen and laughed until she'd damn near wet her pants.

"I just-," He runs his fingers through his hair. "I just don't know who to tell or how to tell it," he confesses.

"Well, you're never going to tell anyone if you don't start somewhere," she points out mildly, and settles in her chair. She picks up her mostly empty teacup and sips.

He squares his shoulders and rubs his hands together; he's steeling himself for what he's got to say. "Something killed my wife on the ceiling of my son's nursery," he says finally. It emerges in a rush, spit from his mouth like thick phlegm.

"Go on," she urges.

He stares at her, hands fisted and trembling on the tabletop. "You believe me?" Dazed and incredulous.

She swallows the last of her tea and looks him in the eye when she answers. "You wouldn't be here if you could explain what happened. You're a man who's seen a lot of terrible things in this life, and I don't think you're prone to the screaming vapors."

He scrubs his face with his hands. "I keep telling myself that I didn't see what I thought I did, that it's not possible for my-for my wife to burn to death on the ceiling above my boy's crib." His mouth works, and grief radiates from him like heat, but he clears his throat, and the tears don't come.

But she knows he did, because now she sees it, too, unspooling in her mind's eye like an unfurled tapestry. She sees the nursery and the teddy-bear mobile hung above the crib. She sees the flutter of the curtain in the night breeze, and when the eye shifts, she sees the baby. _Sammy, _she thinks, and the baby smiles. He's looking at the mobile, reaching for his teddy-bear friends with fat fingers.

The shadow falls over the crib, and even from the safety of her remove, she senses the perverse, pestilential _wrongness _of whatever casts it. She tries to recoil, to shut her damnable, nosy eye, but it's no use; it has suddenly become lidless and paralytic, and it shows her everything.

_Oh, no. Oh, Lord, no. _It's a beseeching moan inside her head.

Sam notices the shadow, too, and his clutching hands droop. He crams a finger into his mouth and whimpers. He knows it's wrong, too, that shadow. His little body retreats into the mattress as far as it can, but it's not far enough, and the white bars of his crib offer him no protection. He can only watch and wait, and when the scabrous hands reach into his crib, all he can do is scream.

It's the screaming that brings his mama. Of course it is. Mother-love is the strongest compulsion in the world, stronger than fear or death, and she comes to see why her baby is carrying on. She doesn't know what waits for her. She thinks he's hungry or in need of a fresh didy. She doesn't know she's coming to the end.

_She'd've come even if she did know, _she thinks. _She was his mama._

She realizes something is wrong the minute she crosses the threshold of his room, the soles of her feet warm on the cool hardwood of the nursery floor. It's the smell. Not baby powder and dirty diapers and breast milk, but sulfur and raw sewage, Hell's outhouse in high summer. Rancid pork fat. A smell like that has no place in a baby's room, and her heart slams into the roof of her mouth and brings with it the taste of mercury.

"John!" screams mother Mary, and that's the last word she ever says.

John comes running in his socks and boxer shorts and t-shirt, but for once, he's not fast enough to make everything all right. He takes the stairs two and three at a time and skids to a halt in from of the baby's room, but it's all over even then. He slips into the room and sees nothing but his boy, squirming in his crib and smiling at the teddy bears drifting lazily on their mobile. It's not until blood drips onto his baby's head like water from a baptismal font that he looks up.

And then he sees.

She can't blame him for screaming or for reaching towards the flames in spite of all common sense. His fingertips redden and blister, and still he reaches for his sun. But she's too far, and the fire is too hot. It billows, a ravenous, molten tongue, and she watches the plaster bubble and blacken behind Mary's hair. It runs like sweat and tears and drips onto the nursery like acid rain. Pieces of his mother drip into his crib and make it smolder, and Sam lies in his crib and screams.

In the end, father trumps husband. Maybe, Missouri muses as she watches this rancid little mind movie, that's the only choice he can make. His wife has become a screaming Roman candle on the ceiling of the nursery, and his son is still within his reach. He sobs as he scoops the baby from his crib, takes his wife in like a sacrament with each scalding breath, and the memory of his guilt at making his choice presses against her heart and lungs like a stone. He leaves the way he came in, in his socked feet and with tears on his smoke-grimy face, but he's not the same. Never again.

The other boy stands in the hallway in his bare feet, rubbing sleep from his eyes and gazing from his father to the orange light that flickers in the nursery doorway like a guttering nightlight, and back again. He's small in the wide expanse of hallway, lost in his own house.

"Daddy?" Plaintive.

"Take your brother and get out of the house! Now, Dean, go," is all John can say to his boy. Realist has trumped father, and if he can't save his Mary, then he's at least going to save the parts of her that she gave to him on the price of blood. He doesn't know it, but when he hands Sam to his brother and nudges Dean toward the stairs, he looks like he did when he was nineteen and shouldering an M-16 in a sweatbox jungle in Vietnam, crazy with the war and the madness carried by Asian mosquitoes

Dean is wide-eyed and pale, but he goes, bare feet thudding down the stairs like a racing heartbeat, and John Winchester, who's been taught never to leave a man behind, goes back for one last charge at the fire. But his Mary is gone, has been gone. He emerges from the room one last time, shirt smoldering. He follows his sons from the house. He's undergone a final transformation. The fire has burned everything away, and down at the bone and sinew, John Winchester is a survivor. The only trace he leaves of himself in that house is his footprints, outlined in soot from the second-floor landing to the front door. After that, he simply disappears. Like a ghost.

She sees all of this before her mind's eye closes and he opens his mouth, but she never says a word. She lets him tell it. There's a healing in the telling even though it hurts, and it _does _hurt; any doubt about that is erased by the whiteness of his eyes and the bruised darkness beneath his eyelids, as though life has reached down and fetched him a good lick in the face. She supposes it has. She holds her empty teacup and listens to his words as they scour his throat raw, roughen his voice with the memory of smoke.

He finishes his story abruptly. He doesn't draw it to a gentle conclusion; he drops it like a heavy load, and she doubts he'll ever pick it up again. Except for his boys, maybe. Blood runs strong. But only if he has to.

He sits at the table and shudders and puffs; the casting off of a burden leaves its own ache behind, and he rubs his slumped shoulders to knead it away and slurps cold coffee in an effort to warm himself. He grimaces, sets the cup down with surprising delicacy, and gazes earnestly at her.

"Well?" he asks, and he doesn't need to say anymore. They both know what he means, what he's asking.

She sits back in her chair, and the wood creaks like arthritic joints. "Something awful set its sights on you, John," she says quietly, "and I'm so sorry."

He stares at her, poleaxed by the realization that she believes him. He lets out a gasping watery breath, and he slumps in his chair as all the air leaves him. "Shit," he says weakly, and rubs his nape.

"Mouth," she chides, but there's no real rebuke. It's a habit as old and unthinking as breathing. Then, "You thought I wouldn't believe you."

A huff that might be laughter, and he nods. "Hell, I didn't know if I should believe it. I thought I was going crazy."

_Before the end, you'll wish you were, _she thinks sadly, but she keeps it to herself. It's a truth that will do more harm than good, and Lord knows the man could use a small measure of kindness even if it came in the form of a lie of omission.

"No madness in you, John. You just got yourself a spot of trouble, that's all."

He laughs, relieved, and brittle as March ice. Hysteria lurks underneath, broken glass and black water. "So, what now?"

She surveys him in silence and listens to the grave tick of the grandfather clock just off the front hall. She imagines it's her heartbeat. "I think I'd like to meet your boys, if you don't mind. Bring them by when you get a chance."

She sees the gears grinding inside his head at that. His children are all he's got left, and he guards them with a soldier's vigilance and a father's fury. He studies her, and she watches his eyes narrow and his nostrils flare as he decides whether or not to trust her or to run from this house and never look back.

"I just might do that," he says at last, and rises from his chair. "In fact, I should probably get back to them now."

She rises, too, and pats him on the shoulder just like she does all her lost sheep. She accompanies him to the front door and gazes into his haggard, thin face. "You do that," she says gently. "But don't you be a stranger around here."

"No ma'am," he answers with a tired but earnest smile, and she catches a glimpse of the boy he had been before war and the Devil chewed him up and spat him out a man.

He leaves with the heavy clop of workboots on wood and flagstone, a warhorse taking up the bridle once more. When he has gotten into the car and driven out of sight, she turns around, goes into the kitchen, and rummages in her freezer for the package of Toll House frozen cookies she'd bought on irresistible impulse on her last trip to the grocery store. Just the thing for a five-year-old boy who had already lost most of childhood's sweetness. John will be back with the boys, all right, and soon. He's a man who never does anything half-assed. If she's lucky, she'll have just enough time.

_December 17, 1983, 2:45pm_

The cookies have been on the plate less than five minutes when she hears the throaty rumble of the Chevy as it glides onto her street.

_Stray cat strut, _she thinks, _and oh, my, my, my, can that kitty purr._

When she opens the door, John Winchester is there with a baby on one hip and a tattered duffel bag over one shoulder. He's grown a shadow since he's been gone, and it stares warily at her with solemn, hazel-green eyes.

"Hello, Dean," she says kindly

He shuffles his feet, but he straightens his shoulders and says, "Hello, ma'am." His eyes are guarded, though, and too dull for a boy who should be giddy with visions of sugarplums dancing him his head. Then again, if all the sugarplums were covered in ash, maybe they lost their lure.

She resists the urge to run her fingers through his untidy mop of blond hair. Instead, she stands aside to let them pass and gestures to the couch. "Well, come on in. I've got cookies if you want them."

Dean follows his father inside, dutifully mimicking his scraping of soles on the welcome mat, and spares her a cautious, sidelong glance. "Chocolate chip?" he asks, and the note of hope in his voice reassures her. Still a little boy under all those bruises on his soul. She can see them if she opens her mind's eye. Over his heart, mostly, but there are some in his stomach, too, and for some reason, she has a clear impression of worms wriggling and turning in his belly. The bruises are deep and ugly, and they weep even when he doesn't.

"As a matter of fact, they are," she tells him. "How about a cookie or two and a tall glass of milk?"

He hesitates and looks to his father, who nods. "Yes, please," he says, and though she's looking at Dean, she sees a muscle in John's face twitch on the periphery of her vision. There and gone in a blink, as though to hear his boy speak without sorrow hurts too much to bear.

_Like as not, it's the memories in it that do all the hurtin',_ says Grandmama Mose. _Good times never taste so sweet nor hurt so bad as when they're gone._

She goes to the kitchen for the cookies and milk, and when she comes back, Dean is sitting on the couch, legs twitching with the need to swing his feet and hands folded on his lap. His eyes light up when he sees the tray of cookies, but he doesn't reach for one until she's set it on the low, stubby-legged, square table. He's a well-mannered boy, which is a blessing in this age of screaming terrors, but the rigid discipline with which he holds himself makes her heart hurt. It's the mark of a boy who's had the carefree laziness of childhood whipped right out of him. John's a military man who believes in obedience; she doesn't have to be gifted with the sight to know that, but she suspects that he never meant for anything like this. Dean reminds her a Puritan boy, sitting ramrod-straight on a hard, wooden pew and waiting for the Devil to reach up from Hell and tweak him between the legs.

"Mind you set that glass on the doily, Dean, you hear?" she says as she sits down.

"Yes, ma'am," he replies, and she hears his spine creak as he tries to sit even straighter.

"And who's this?" she asks the baby grinning toothlessly at her from John's lap and tugging on his toes. She knows full well who it is, but she has no desire for this visit to be a one-way conversation.

John opens his mouth, but Dean is quicker. "'S Sammy," he says around a mouthful of warm cookie, and a fine mist of crumbs sprays from his mouth.

At the mention of his name, Sam crows happily, holds out his arms, and leans forward on his father's lap. He is the polar opposite of Dean, sunshine to his brother's shadow. He bounces, and his little hands open and close as if he were waving and beckoning for her at the same time.

She laughs. She can't help it. His smile is infectious. "Why, hello, Samuel. It's a pleasure to meet you." She reaches out and strokes a small, chubby hand.

Sam bellows gleefully and dives for her. He tumbles from John's lap, and his small, brown-fuzzed head narrowly misses her shin. She expects him to cry or fuss, but he doesn't. He just looks up at her and grins, pulling himself upright by the front of her blouse. His hands pat at her, and he flops contentedly against her, feet kicking aimlessly.

"Well, ain't you sweet?" she says. Samuel Winchester might be seven months old, but he's charmed the pants off her faster and more efficiently than plenty of grown men who still lament their failure down at Stokely's pub on Friday nights.

"He pees in the bathtub," Dean informs her, as though to point out a flaw. "One time, he pooped in it, too."

"Dean-," John scolds.

"It's all right," she interrupts. "Nothing wrong with relaxing in the tub," she answers comfortably. "It all washes down the drain. Besides, he'll grow out of it soon enough," she adds when he stops eating his cookie and regards her with a thoughtful expression, as though he's imagining her engaging in such doings in her bathtub. Boy was quiet, but he was too sharp by half.

"Oh." He surveys her shrewdly for a moment longer, and then takes another bite of cookie.

Sam leans over one encircling arm and reaches for Dean's remaining scrap of cookie as if to avenge the tarnishing of his reputation.

Dean holds the cookie out of reach. "No, Sammy, you're too little," he says patiently, but he carefully picks a chocolate chip from the soft, crumbly cookie and puts it between his baby brother's wet, pink gums.

Sam accepts the gift with a gurgle and flops against her chest and belly. Dean puts the rest of the cookie into his own mouth, and chews it with relish, unaware that he has a smear of chocolate in the corner of his upper lip. He reaches for another.

"That's your last one, Dean," John says from beside him. "Don't want to spoil your supper."

"Yes, sir." Resigned. "Macaroni and cheese again?"

John flushes. "It's what there is."

"Yes, sir," he says, and though he doesn't say it, she catches a glimpse of his unspoken thought before he banishes it from his mind. _At least Sammy gets strained peas or gooshy carrot pudding. _

She bites the inside of her cheek. That boy is going to be full of piss and vinegar once he starts to fill out his britches, that is for sure. She keeps the sentiment to herself and adds it to the pile of truths best discarded.

Dean takes his time eating this cookie, prolongs his enjoyment as long as he can, and every now and then, he stops and offers Sam a chip. She waits for John to reprimand him for giving the baby so much sugar, but he never does. He just sits with one arm draped on the back of the couch and watches his boys. His throat works, his Adam's apple a barometer of all the things he can't or won't say.

_Every time he looks at them, the knife goes in a little deeper, cuts a little closer to broken bones, _Grandmama Mose mutters. _Livin's Hell, but dyin' isn't a choice he can make. Not with mouths to feed._

Dean finishes his cookie, starts to lower his hands to the couch, and freezes when he notices the smears of chocolate on his fingers. He looks around for a napkin or a towel and considers the doily upon which his half-finished milk sits, but he decides against it and fixes his father with a panicked, beseeching glance. "Dad?" he says.

"Go on and wash up in the bathroom, honey," she tells him. "It's just down the hall, second door."

He glances at his father for permission, and when he gives an imperceptible nod, Dean slithers from the couch with the boneless grace of the young and unfinished and shuffles timorously toward the dim hallway. He hesitates on the threshold between the rooms and stands on his tiptoes to peer the length of the hallway. There's nothing in that hallway to harm a small boy. No trolls or monsters lurk along the baseboards. Just dust bunnies and tables decorated with flowers and cheap, ceramic figurines, and the only leering eye belongs to the mirror mounted on the wall opposite the guest bedroom.

Satisfied that no boogeyman waits to snatch him from the world with long, dark fingers that end in dirty claws, he spares the living room a last, furtive glance over one skinny shoulder and disappears, Hansel setting off into the deep, dark woods. It's absurd, but she wishes him well. The world can be a damn scary place.

When he's out of earshot, she turns to John and asks, "He remember any of it?"

He shrugs. "I don't know. He barely talks. He used to be manic about Christmas, but this year-," He shrugs again. "Maybe it's hard to get excited about a fat guy coming down the chimney when your mom went up one."

He utters a choked, humorless bark of laughter. It reminds her of a man drowning in his own blood, and so does his expression. His lips are pulled back from his teeth in a snarl, and she knows the knife has slipped deeper into his guts. She says nothing. Instead, she fusses with the doily on the coffee table and grants him the courtesy of blindness.

"Least this one came out okay," she says, and tickles Sam's fist. He obligingly flexes his fingers and smiles.

But even as she speaks, she realizes that it's not true. Whatever came for his mama and carried her away in a whirlwind of fire has left its mark on the baby, a faint, lingering taint that makes her stomach roll uneasily in its moorings. She discreetly lowers her head and buries her nose in the downy mop of hair on his head. Baby shampoo and soap, and underneath those good, clean smells, a low, rotten stink, bad eggs and spoiled meat and the faint, gassy reek of shit, a Tuscaloosa outhouse in July. Her gorge rises, but she wrestles it into submission by taking deep, steady breaths through her nose. The baby takes no notice of her discomfort. When she finally raises her head, he stares guilelessly at her with bright, inquisitive eyes and attempts at curl his tenacious fingers around the gold cross at her neck.

_Innocence corrupted, _she thinks dismally as she watches him test the purity of her gold with the slick, wrinkled nubs of his gums. _That's what you are. Whatever got your mama that night planted a nasty seed inside you, and it meant for it to take root and grow there, but your mama interrupted it before it could finish. It could grow or wither on the vine. Only time will tell which it's gonna be, but either way, it's gonna be a long, hard road for you, sweetheart. For all of you._

She suspects she _could_ know if she wanted, could open her mind's eye wide and watch the seed rot or blossom into a dark and terrible flower. Part of her wants to-the eye does, anyway. It twitches and strains in needy anticipation, but she keeps it firmly shut because she doesn't _want_ to know. If she does, she'll have to tell the man sitting next to her on the couch the truth. She can't lie, not about this. It's too big, too dangerous. But it would be one more truth than this man could stand. Right now, he's glass beneath the skin, and one more grain of sand would shatter him.

So she smoothes Sam's shirt and makes small talk about what he got the boys for Christmas. Dean comes back from the bathroom, drying his hands on the rough denim of his jeans. He doesn't reclaim his spot on the couch. Instead, he stands in front of the Christmas tree and solemnly examines the ragged tinsel that decorates its plastic branches. She'd had real trees once, but she'd gotten tired of minding the water levels and sweeping up dead pine needles every day like it was the twelve days of Christmas chores. It's been plastic for the past five years, praise God and Taiwan.

None of that bothers Dean. He's captivated by the colors and ornaments and the string of lights. He reaches out to stroke the tinsel with damp, reverent fingers. From the corner of her eye, she sees John open his mouth like he's going to rebuke him for touching what doesn't belong to him, and she hears the intake of breath, but the words never come. He just closes his mouth and watches his boy catch a glimpse of the childhood he's left behind.

Dean squats, and for a minute, she thinks he's been attracted by the presents arranged beneath the tree, but then he reaches out and grabs one of the ornaments. It lies in his cupped hand, and the expression that crosses his face when he looks at it is too adult for his small, haunted face. It's wistful and broken and-

_Home. It's home, pure and simple._

It's Woodstock, Snoopy's eternal companion. She'd found him at a rummage sale God knows when ago and bought him on a whim, intending, she thinks now, to give him to her niece as a Christmas present. Or maybe that was the excuse she'd use to justify buying the damned yellow bird when she was old enough to know better and too broke to afford it. Either way, old Woodstock had flown the coop of the rickety bric-a-brac table and nested in the bedraggled branches of her tree. He's showing his age now; his bright yellow feathers are faded and he's even molted a few and left only white scrapes to mark their loss. She can't fault him his lost youth, though. She's losing hers, too. She's not old-not yet, but it won't be long now until grey creeps into her hair and arthritis settles into her bones like an old friend come to stay a while.

"What you got there?" she asks him even though she can see Woodstock in his pink palm.

"Woodstock," he answers. "He's Snoopy's friend. Sometimes he sits on Snoopy's doghouse while he writes his stories. You ever read the Snoopy comics?"

"A time or two," she allows.

He doesn't say anything for a long time. The silence hangs, broken by the ticking of the grandfather clock and an uncertain grunt from Sam, who leans forward on her lap, a little old man trying desperately to hear a whispered conversation. Beside her, John has gone still; the pulsepoint flutters at his throat, and his fingers tighten convulsively around his knees. It's an oddly prim posture despite the obvious air of urgency, and her lips curl in a fleeting, unconscious smile.

"Mama loves the Snoopy comics," he says suddenly, and John Winchester flinches and gives voice to a stifled groan.

_Damn knife's gone in to the hilt now, _mutters Grandmama Mose, and she supposes it's true, but God forgive her, at the moment, she doesn't give a good goddamn about him. She's more worried about Dean. He's got a knife of his own sticking deep in his insides. His bottom lip is steady, but there's no blood in it, and his eyes are too wide and feverish inside his face.

_Boy needs a good bawl, _she muses.

"It was her favorite," Dean continues, and the words are sticky and thin in his throat. "She reads it to me every day. Sundays are the best, though, 'cause they got color. I used to sit on her lap, but then Sammy made her tummy too big. Then I had to sit next to her or on the floor." There's a faint note of accusation in his voice at this revelation, but there is no hostility in his eyes when he tears his gaze from Woodstock and looks at his baby brother, only sorrow and a muddy, fierce affection that startles her with its naked intensity. Samuel is his, come what may.

_They're gonna need devotion that burns that hot before the end. _The thought comes unbidden, and a shudder ripples up her spine.

Dean returns his attention to the old and dying Woodstock in his hand, and when he speaks this time, it's so low that she almost misses it. "I want my Mama."

All the air goes out of John Winchester, and were it not for his hands upon his knees, she has no doubt that he would simply fold in on himself, a straw man whose stuffing has been torn out. In that instant when she watches a father struggle to keep his insides beneath the skin for the sake of his boy, she understands that her initial assessment of John Winchester is correct. He's a man who loves hard, and he loves Mary Winchester and the boys she bore him more than life. Loves enough to kill and die and sell his soul for them, and a small, matter-of –fact voice in her heart tells her he'll do plenty of those things before the dust settles. It's the only way the knives they carry will ever come out, and even under the best of circumstances, she knows they won't come cleanly. They'll leave scars and wounds that will weep and bleed long after eyes have dried. Some may bleed until the dirt covers their coffins and the flesh sloughs from their bones.

Sam senses the tension in the room and sets to fussing, whimpering and rocking on her lap.

"All right. All right, now," she soothes, and passes him to his father, who accepts him without a word, eyes damp and glazed.

She rises from the couch and goes to Dean, who isn't much better off. His fingers are closed around poor old Woodstock as if he's trying to usher him from dying to dead, and his eyes are bruised and dark. He doesn't look at her as she stands beside him and rests her hand on one stiff, bony shoulder.

"You liked that very much," she says softly. "Her reading to you."

He nods and his chest hitches. "Yes'm," he replies, and his Adam's apple bobs. He's his father's son with his mother's face, and he swallows his grief like a cold lump of gristle.

She plucks Woodstock from his drooping branch and brushes Dean's clutching fingers with her cool, dry ones. "Why don't you take him with you, Dean? I'm sure he'd enjoy a change of scenery."

John gives a squawk of protest from behind her, and she rounds on him before he can kick up dickens about not accepting charity. She's not in the mood to coddle his nettled ego.

"You can just _stow _that mess," she says emphatically as he opens his mouth to tell Dean to put it back. "It's not charity; it's kindness, and yes, John Winchester, there is a difference. We both know Santa will be coming in a few days, but until he does, I'm going to give him a little help. Besides, it's my bird, and I can do what I want with it. I can bake him in a casserole dish if I'm of a mind." She glares at him in mute challenge, hands on her hips. "It's my house you're standing in," she reminds him.

She expects him to argue anyway, and he wants to. She can see it in his eyes, the shadow of a scarred, old hound tugging at the frayed rope that binds him to the earth. But it's a measure of how tired he is that he doesn't. His shoulders slump inside his jacket, and the dog that lives behind his eyes flops bonelessly to the dirt, sides heaving and tongue lolling. There have been too many battles even over these past few days, and this is one he'd rather not fight.

He stands and hitches Sam on one hip, and Dean, who has been standing behind her and peering from behind her legs with Woodstock fisted in his hand, takes that as his cue to retreat and scuttles to his father's side. He hovers uncertainly beside him and strokes Sam's chubby, bare foot.

"Thank you," John says. Tired and gravelly.

"Thank you, ma'am," Dean echoes dutifully, and his fingers tighten convulsively around Woodstock.

"You're welcome, Dean. You take care of him, you hear?"

"Yes'm," he says solemnly. "I will."

"Well, Miss Missouri, I appreciate your help and this afternoon, but I've got to get the boys back to the house. It's been a long day."

Of course he does, she thinks as she smiles. He's committed the cardinal sin of showing weakness. Not once, but twice. He's got to get away now, mop up the blood and close the wounds and nurse his beer in the dark until he can right himself and go back to pretending that everything is fine. If he pretends for long enough, he can make it real. At least, that's what he tells himself when the only light to touch his face is the faint, skim-milk glow of the television and the only voice is that of the preacher who can build a stairway to Heaven if you'll just send him one hundred dollars. She suspects that voice will lull him to sleep tonight.

She accompanies them to the door and bids them come back anytime. It's what she says to all her clients, and most of the time, it's so much hot air between her gums, but she means it this time. She _does_ want to see them again, and she knows that she will. Maybe not soon, because John isn't a man to forget embarrassment, but in time. His desire to know the truth is stronger than his pride.

She watches them trudge down the steps, a ragtag family bound by blood and loss and love. They're frayed at the edges and bruised at the heart and soul, but the ties that bind are still holding fast. John puts his arm around Dean and steers him toward the waiting car, and Dean curls his fingers around Sam's ankle, loose but possessive. His. Flesh of his flesh, and damn well worth dying for. She hopes he never has to and then wonders why such a thought would ever enter her mind.

John opens the door, and Dean lifts Sam from his arms. He pauses with one foot planted on the running board and his arms full of a wriggling, squirming baby. Woodstock's feathery mohawk peeks timidly from his engulfing fingers. He turns to look at her, and his expression is so melancholy that she wonders if he hasn't read her like a book.

_He's gonna look like James Dean when he gets older, _she thinks with dim astonishment. _I wonder if his mama knew that when she picked his name._

She considers asking John, calling the question after him on the cold, heavy air, but she doesn't. It's irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, and James Dean is for later. Right now, Dean Winchester is four years old, and he needs to go to his secret place and tell Woodstock all the things his father can't stand to hear. Besides, John isn't the only one with pride and a keen sense of embarrassment. So, she merely waves and lets it go, lets them go. There's a brief, inexplicable lurch of disappointment in her stomach as they drive out of sight, but it doesn't last. She knows it's not forever.

She's got one more appointment with John Winchester. She starts to hum as she goes back inside and shuts the door.

_December 20, 1983_

He turns up on her doorstep three days later, this time without the boys. His shoulders are slumped, and it looks like he hasn't shaved since she saw him last.

"Hello, John," she says calmly as she meets him at the door, but there's a nervous flutter of anticipation in her stomach that sours her mouth. He's back to play another round of Show and Tell, and she's not sure she wants to see what he's brought.

"Hello, Miss Missouri," he replies politely enough, but he's bouncing on his toes and drumming his hands on his thighs in a jittery, staccato rhythm.

"What can I do for you?" she asks. "You want to come in? I can put on a pot."

He bounces more furiously than ever and rubs his nape. "Actually, I was hoping you'd come somewhere with me." He flashes her an ingratiating smile, but his eyes are bleak and desperate.

"Where we going?" Casual, but her heart has sped up inside her chest, and her hand is curiously light where it curls around the door.

He switches from bouncing to sidling. "I thought we could visit the house. Maybe seeing it would give you a better sense of what happened, what I'm up against."

She's afraid. Not of John-the man is a hardass, but he's decent to the bone-but of where he wants to go. She understands that it's a marked place now, and any fool who sets foot on its grounds will carry the residue on their skin. Ash and soot and dust made of burnt flesh and the nasty stink of the monster that slithered out of the darkness to claim what never belonged to it. Even the dead and damned leave ghosts behind.

_No, I don't think I want to, _she thinks with sudden conviction, and though the sky over John's shoulder is leaden but clear, she sees roiling thunderheads bloated with rain. _You're well shut of that place now, and I don't need to see it to know it's been tainted. The best thing you can do for yourself is burn the rest of that damn house down and never look back._

She doesn't want to go, and that's final, but her feet turn and carry her towards the bedroom and her coat and gloves, and her mouth tells him that she'll be right out. She goes because she bought and paid for this the minute she let John cross her threshold, and she has to finish the walk she started. And because she sees Dean in the back of her mind, four years old and holding on to a cheap Christmas ornament of Woodstock like it was the last good thing he was ever going to get out of this world.

She returns ten minutes later, bundled in her fleece-lined winter coat and hand-knitted gloves. The latter are the last gloves Grandmama Moseley ever knitted, and the old cotton makes her feel safe and loved. Memories are powerful magic, she knows, and she secretly believes that they're the most precious gift the good Lord ever gave a man, more precious than the blood He shed on some sun-scorched, godforsaken hill in the name of salvation. Memories kept you sane in the face of madness.

John escorts her to the car and holds open the door for her, and though he hasn't seen twenty in a long time, she catches a fleeting glimpse of the young man he must have been not so long ago. She sees polished brass buttons on a hunter-green uniform and black, spit-polished shoes on black-socked feet. A straight back and a crisp salute and snapping, black eyes that glow with pride and the idealism of duty and country. Pretty little soldier boy with his truths all in a row, and she muses that he would been the same as a Revolutionary War drummer boy, marching to battle because that was what _he _had bought and paid for when he scrawled the X on the enlistment papers.

They don't speak on the drive. He stares through the windshield with shuttered eyes and keeps a white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel, and she folds her gloved hands on her lap and studies the interior of the car. It's an Impala, and as she suspected, John Winchester is a detail man, because it's in immaculate condition. There's a blanket wadded in the backseat and a crumpled, torn coloring book stuffed underneath the passenger seat from the rear, but the upholstery is smooth and clean. The car might been a woman, but it smells and moves like a man, all smooth muscle and unspoken threat, and oh, honey, does that engine purr. A whiskey laugh that settles in the pit of her stomach and burns nice and slow. She thinks that if she were inclined, it's the kind of car she could get down and dirty in.

The car glides to a stop in front of a neat, wooden two-story, and John kills the engine with a snap of his wrist and stares through the glass at what had once been his dream home. His face is inscrutable, but his hands curl into fists on his lap. The knife is twisting again, good and deep this time, and there's nothing she can do but look beyond him through the window and study the house for herself.

It's a sturdy A-frame set on two acres. The exterior is a cheery, robin-egg blue with white trim, clean except for a window on the second floor that is blackened and blistered. Paint peels and hangs in sagging, leprous strips, and the burn pattern reminds her of the black eyes she sometimes sees on the pretty barmaid at Stokley's, the one who thinks love is a four-letter word attached to a five-knuckled fist, and who pays for the pleasure of its company with loose teeth and mending bones. It has the same desolate air about it, too, and her heart aches for both of them because she knows she can save neither.

The lawn is frozen and brown now, but it wasn't always. In the summer, it was probably green and lush, and maybe Mary, giddy with the life she had created in Dean and vibrant with the one that would become Sam, had planned a garden. John had likely mowed the grass with sweaty diligence, and she bets that if she were to inspect the lawn foot by foot, she would find barren patches where a grill had once hunkered. As it is, there are still traces of the human garden that the man beside her had once tended. A balding tire swing hangs listlessly from a dingy rope tied around a tree branch.

"Dean used to love that thing," John says as though he's read her mind. "Hung off it like a god-like a monkey. Mary used to scream at him from the kitchen window to be careful before he fell and cracked his skull. She was always worried about stuff like that, you know, always looking out." A muscle in his jaw clenches, and he abruptly changes tacks. "When he wasn't climbing all over it, Dean'd use it for 'quarterback practice.' Said he was going to be the next John Elway."

She rests her hand on his forearm. "You don't have to go inside. Last I checked, my legs weren't broke."

But that's not going to fly. This is still his house, and maybe it always will be. He steels himself, pockets the keys, and gets out of the car. He's coming around to open the door for her again, but she gets out before he can do so, and so they stand shoulder to shoulder behind the half-open passenger door and survey the house. She takes a moment to collect herself and prod her mind's eye into wakefulness, and then she sets off for the house. The car door closes with a hollow _thunk_, and then John is looming protectively in her wake, shoulders drawn up around his neck to protect it from the biting cold and hands stuffed into the pockets of his overcoat, which is, she notes with wry amusement, the same color as everything else he owns: hunter green.

She moves quickly, chin tucked into the upturned collar of her coat, and the soles of her flats crunch on the salt-lined road as she crosses to the pavement. She should've worn her boots, she guesses, but there hadn't been time. She steps onto the sidewalk with a gritty crunch, and two paces after that, the dried, dead grass of the lawn makes a similar sound, broken glass grinding underfoot.

She pauses on the lawn and simply breathes and waits. Her mind's eye blinks and scans her surroundings, but no spook leaps from the leafless, skeletal bushes or erupts from the earth with blind, white eyes and a pulsating, gelatinous body. Nothing stirs at all. The squirrels have gone to their winter rest, and the birds are quiet, as though in mourning along with the man behind her. She's not sure yet what she's looking for or even if she's looking for anything at all, but she'll know it when she finds it. She always has.

John falters when they reach the front door, just freezes with the tarnished key halfway in the lock. He sways on his feet, and then he rests his forearm across the door and his forehead on the comfortless, bony pillow of his arm. He takes a shuddering, phlegmatic breath. "I did this every day for six years," he says dully. "I think this is the last time I'm going to do it."

She doesn't know how to respond to that. She could renew her offer to investigate the house alone, but that would just be a case of second verse, same as the first, and so she says gently, "Then let's get it done, John."

He lifts his head at that, and when his eyes meet hers, they're damp but steady and resolute. He straightens. "Yeah, I think so," he murmurs quietly, and pushes the key home.

The fire lingers, has left its mark in a smudged smear of soot and the memory of smoke. The sharp, bitter stink clings to everything, settles over the floor like dust and seeds itself in the yellowed wallpaper like mildew. It's seeped into the curtains and the fabric of the couch, which still squats in front of a boxy television set sporting a bent pair of rabbit ears. It's even coiled itself around the banister and newel post on the staircase that leads to the heart of the matter.

If there were less of it, she might find it pleasant; fire has pleasant associations in her mind to Grandpapa Mose and his hunting cabin and his flannel shirts, and to a summer night spent with her husband before life taught her that he was a no-account fool who would love her and leave her when the road got hard. But it's too thick, tar on the roof of her mouth, and besides, there's another smell underneath it, lower and nastier, spoiled meat and a Tuscaloosa outhouse in mid-July.

_Damn thing left a scent trail, _she thinks, and breathes through her mouth to blunt the worst of it.

Even so, it's not all bad. Her mind's eye is unfazed by the stink and the yellowing walls and soot-blackened curtains. It sees with perfect clarity, and it shows her reflections of a life once lived within the house's walls. Though John hovers beside her, he also lounges on the couch, socked feet stretched out over its squashy length. It's a trivial detail, but she's amused to note that he had, once upon a time, owned socks and clothes that weren't green. His shade is wearing a white t-shirt and matching socks as it sips iced tea from a glass and watches a program she can't see.

Mary's here, too, and she flits in and out of the eye's field of vision. Sometimes, she stands behind John and rests her hands on his shoulders, and sometimes, she walks the floor with a screaming Samuel and croons to him in her sweet mother tongue. Still other times, she stands on the first riser of the staircase and beckons her man to bed with a twitch of her hips and the sultry promise of love in the dark. She's beckoning to him now, in fact, poised on the riser and enticing him with a boneless, transparent finger, but he can't see her, and Missouri thanks God for small, tender mercies.

And there are the children, of course. Dean pushes a toy truck across the living room rug at his daddy's feet and makes plump puttering noises with his lips, and he also tears across the house with a football in both hands and tracks mud over mama's clean floors. He's a bright firefly of inexhaustible energy, a good boy with a heart as big as his penchant for trouble, and try as the nasty, wet, simmering stink of the evil that stained this house might, it can't obliterate him completely.

Not much, Sam, though; not down here, just fleeting glimpses of him in Mary's arms as she paces the fear of his bright, new world out of him. Sam was upstairs, still slowly descending from heaven, and upstairs is where she needs to go. She approaches the stairs and stares at the faint footprints left by the heavy boots of the firemen as they dragged their houses toward the fire like adders bloated with killing poison. She thinks that if she looks hard enough, she'll see the gossamer imprints of Mary's feet, or maybe Dean's as he carried Sam from the house.

John's coat grazes her back, and that gets her moving. She climbs the stairs slowly, plating her feet on each riser, and the higher she goes, the stronger the smells of smoke and rotten meat get. Wet paper, too, now, moldy bread in an airless room. She breathes through her mouth and grips the banister as tightly as she can, and she smothers the urge to tell John to watch out. The ugliness is stifling, and by the top riser, her eyes have begun to water from the stench.

"God," she manages.

"Missouri," John barks. "You all right? You sense something?"

If she speaks, she'll lose her morning tea all over the landing, and so she nods and lurches onto level ground. Her legs are leaden and wobbly, and walking is like swimming through wet cement. The air is heavy with that damn noisome reek, almost infected with it, and her stomach clenches and heaves.

_I don't think Grandmama Mose's gloves are gonna work this time,_ she thinks wildly. _There aren't enough of them, and they're not strong enough, not by half. You could douse this house in holy water and carpet it in the holy Host, and it wouldn't be enough. Oh, Lord. _Then, _How could he not have felt this?_

He still doesn't feel it. He's standing beside her, sturdy as a fencepost, oblivious to the stink and the cloying air. Probably never felt a thing the night his world upended. In fact, she knows he didn't. He slept right down there on the couch, lulled by a college ballgame recap, and he never knew what he was losing until it was going, going, gone and the tips of his fingers were as blistered and ruined as the paint on the nursery wall.

"Missouri? Missouri, what is it? What do you see?"

She doesn't answer because she doesn't know. It's unlike anything she's ever sensed before. Most of her experience has been with the restless dead and the aching friends and relations they leave behind. She earns her keep coaxing Aunt Luanne into the light and drying the tears of newly-minted orphans and widows. Occasionally, she runs across a mischievous poltergeist or low-level demon. But nothing like this. It is a huge, shadowy monolith of bad intentions, and there is no humanity in it. It is darkness and hatred and gleeful malice, and it is well beyond her simple counsel.

She should turn back and drag that fool of a man with her, and never mind his grief and his thirst for revenge, but this is her walk, and she has to finish it, and besides, she has to know what they are facing, has to see what they are up against to give them a fighting chance. So she presses onward, staggering like a drunk and supporting herself with the wall. The stucco is harsh and knobbled on her palm, and she uses it to anchor herself to the present.

Halfway down the hall, she sees Dean, frozen in the hall and staring at his brother's nursery in rapturous stupefaction. He's transfixed by the tongues of flame licking and beckoning like his mama's coy fingers. Though he's nothing but a remnant of the past, he turns at the sound of her approach.

"Daddy?" he says hopefully, and a minute later, the real John Winchester of back then darts in the hall with Sam in his arms.

"Take your brother and get out of the house. Go now!"

Dean turns and carries his brother away, and she feels him pass, a whisper of breeze in the stillness. She knows it's just a fragment of memory playing itself out on an endless loop, but she wishes him luck anyway and wills him to get the hell out while he still can. Lord knows he's smarter than her stupid ass.

She stops in front of the room the John Winchester of back then had so recently vacated. She's upright only by dint of her clawed hand on the doorframe now, and soon, that isn't going to be enough, either. She teeters on the threshold. She doesn't want to go in there. Neither does John, apparently. He hangs back, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket. He wants to stay out there, where the memories are sweeter. She doesn't blame him.

_You've got to go on, _Grandmama Mose urges implacably. _Take that last step._

_Oh, but mama, it's so high, _she thinks in a semi-swoon. _And the drop is so long._

She lifts a foot that has become a block of concrete on the end of her ankle and steps into the room. It's like stepping into scummy molasses, and she moans, a helpless, thick mewl in her mouth. She can't, she can't, and oh, God, it smells so bad, like the Devil's graveyard vomited up from the earth. She stumbles forward and hits her knees, and she cries. The tears feel like blood and pus on her cheeks, and that image stirs her stomach with a greasy stick. She retches, but nothing comes up. She doesn't dare breathe because she doesn't want any of this inside her. She knows that if it gets inside her guts, she'll die of cancer before Hannah Lindstrom pops her cork. It will kill her hard and slow and she will die with blood on her teeth like plum wine.

She drops to her hands and knees and crawls desperately for the door. She's blind now, but her mind's eye sees just fine, and as she blunders toward the exit, she has a revelation. Dean Winchester is going to look a lot like James Dean, right down to the leather jacket and cocksure smile, and if he's not careful, he's going to die like him, too, smashed to jelly inside that car sitting across the street. The realization makes her sob, and she grits her teeth against an intake of breath.

"Missouri?" John's voice, urgent and faraway.

Her lungs burn, but she refuses to breathe. It's living death, this sour, spoiled air. Booted feet appear on the wavering edges of her vision, and then arms grab her beneath the tits and heave her off the floor like a heavy rucksack. Praise God for Marine Corps muscle. He sidles into the hall with her, and it's only when he clears the threshold and sets her on the floor that she gulps a blessed lungful of air.

"I'm all right, 'M all right," she croaks, but she sounds anything but with her nose full of snot. She wobbles to all fours and promptly vomits on the floor in a warm, chunky splatter. It looks like blackberry preserves, but she hasn't eaten blackberry anything in years. She wipes runners of bile from her chin and scuttles away from the mess. So much for dignity. "Let's get the hell out of here," she pleads.

He half-carries her down the stairs and out of the house, and she leaves her own mark splattered on the stairs and the front porch. He sets her on her feet long enough to open the passenger door of the car, and she scrabbles into it, ass in the air as she crawls onto the seat. She rights herself, heaves once more out the window, and collapses against the leather.

John quizzes her relentlessly on the drive home, eager for answers, but she just shakes her head and tells him to crank the heater until it roars. Her skin will pay for it later, dry and ashy and rough as sandpaper, but she needs the warmth and to sweat that place from her skin.

"Yellow eyes," she says to him with a sticky, shriveled tongue. "He had yellow eyes."

She tells him the same thing later, when she's wrapped in a clean, terrycloth bathrobe and sitting in her favorite chair. She tells him everything she saw in that room. She doesn't want to, but she has no choice. Much as he might not like it, this isn't about revenge anymore, and never was. It's about Sam, his boy with the soft brown eyes and infectious smile. The thing with yellow eyes means to have him, to tend the seed he so carefully sowed that night. She tells him everything about what happened, and it's a hard truth that cuts and scrapes her mouth as it comes and floods it with the taste of blood.

But she doesn't tell him everything she knows about what will happen, and she doesn't care if that makes her a coward. There's such a thing as too much truth, and if John Winchester knew the cost of the road he was about to walk, he'd lose his mind. He'll learn for himself in time, and maybe he and the boys can stand tall and survive the individual blows if they think that the last one will truly be the last and the hardest. She doesn't lie to him; she simply closes her eyes and refuses to look any farther than she has to.

When he leaves her house filled with renewed purpose, she pats his back and says nothing, and when she is sure that her legs will hold her, she goes to the kitchen and fixes a pot of tea. But the first sip tastes bitter, like burnt wood, and she spits it out and pours the whole pot down the sink. She goes into the bedroom and gathers the material for a cleansing.

She performs the ritual in methodical silence, unaware that she is crying. Outside, snow begins to fall, and it coats the roof like ash.


End file.
